The Surfer

Bluesky

One of those films that announces its intentions at the outset with its font choice and the particular colour of the sky, The Surfer is a delicious slice of Seventies-style horror, served hot. A littoral response to Wake In Fright, heavy with symbolism and portent, it focuses on a man’s return to the community where he grew up, and where he is now considered an outsider. With a violent gang ruling the beach, there are shades of Surf Nazis Must Die, but our hero is not a natural fighter. It’s his desperation to hold on to civilised values that places him at odds with the local conception of masculinity and the deep-rooted nature of his own desires.

The film is set mostly out of doors. The sun beats down relentlessly, delivering intense colours which gradually replace the silver, grey and taupe of civilisation as the Surfer (Nicolas Cage) finds himself losing control. The heat is omnipresent, rippling through the air, distorting what we see, distorting time and identity. Despite – or perhaps because of – the absurdity of localism in a country so recently colonised (the community is made up mostly of white people), there is a sense of deep time here. The readiness to risk everything in the attempt to conquer a wave also speaks to something primitive. We watch from the clifftop as the men on their boards are tossed around by the ocean. They look like insects – tiny, wriggling things – yet when they fight and drink and walk on the hot sand, their belief in their own power is absolute.

It should go without saying that this film is a fable, not a conventional narrative. Whilst each individual plot development is constructed well enough to be believable, in their mass they become absurd. What matters is that Cage is believable, getting to play a character who is in most respects quite grounded and therefore distinct from most of what he’s given – but, of course, able to ramp it up a notch when that’s called for. He’s convincing in his depiction of not just physical suffering but mental anguish, as a man who has devoted his whole life to a singular dream and now fears that it will be taken away from him. Some would call it an unhealthy obsession – it is certainly one that puts his health at risk, and perhaps his very life – but the desire to return to a beloved home is something that a lot of viewers will strongly relate to.

The character’s nostalgic reveries are supported by brief flashbacks which sometimes also imply portent. How reliable is memory, and what limits might there be on its direction? One of his most treasured memories is of the sunsets on that stretch of coast, and Finnegan captures them in all their glory, recalling the famous shot at the end of The Wicker Man. His style, in these moments, also owes something to the work of Sergio Leone.

The largeness of these thematic elements and of the key characters – our hero finding himself in opposition to Julian McMahon’s hard-nosed, belligerent surf guru – itself becomes absurd in contrast with the smallness of the setting, the action never straying far from the beach and the car park behind it. Ego and ambition are not constrained by the pettiness of the conflict, but rather seem to feed upon it.

It is only in the presence of the Surfer’s teenage son (Finn Little) that this distorted reality begins to crack; that our hero is aware that he has, in fact, loved something else, and not just that place, not just the waves. Did his father feel the same way about him? A white lie about a watch – one he has perhaps told himself often enough that he believes it to be true – evokes the pain not just of absence, of loss, but of something that presaged those things. Does he feel called to the ocean because it once felt like the only way to matter where it counted most? Can he escape the cycle, the spell of this place, where the waves roll in as they have done for thousands of years and will do for thousands more?

Unapologetically overblown, oversaturated, deliciously bold, The Surfer is the sort of sticky dessert you’ll keep returning for more of, despite the queasiness in the pit of your stomach. For a certain kind of film fan, it will feel like going home.